Postoffice

Postoffice is free software released under the terms of a BSD-style license.

If you find it useful, please consider making a contribution to help support onward development.

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Postoffice 1.5.12, released 9-Aug-2018

description

Postoffice is a simple SMTP mail server and client. I wrote it for pell because spam was getting out of control and I would rather write my own mail service than continue to hack up sendmail for antispammery.

Postoffice provides a greylist to slow down the rate of incoming spam, and can be configured to do antivirus checking on incoming mail either via the sendmail milter protocol or a traditional hardcoded AV program.

Postoffice can be configured to deliver mail to accounts inside vm-pop3d-style virtual domains, and it can further be enabled to support AUTH LOGIN for people inside virtual domains, so they can use postoffice as a mail forwarder when replying to mail (I’ve also written some virtual domain utility programs to go along with the virtual domain code in postoffice and vm-pop3d.)

Postoffice accepts (and ignores) many of the same command line options that are passed to sendmail, and it comes with the usual crop of sendmail compatable aliases; runq, mailq, newaliases, and sendmail.

Source Code

version 1.5.12

1.5.12 cleans up a couple of long-standing buglets, plus portability tweaking for ARM, modern Linuxes, and Minix v3.

The long standing buglets are

  1. If the incoming mail didn’t have a Date: header, postoffice would generate one every time it attempted to deliver the mail, so if the mail was rejected by a greylist subsequent deliveries would have more than one Date: header. Most MTAs don’t care, and will cheerfully accept a message with an arbitrary # of them, but some will become very cross and will throw the message back with a 5xx “son, I don’t like the tone of your headers” message. This is not good behavior on postoffice’s part, so I reworked the code that generates missing headers to only generate them once when the mail is received.

    (This is related to the Message-ID: bug in 1.5.10; the patch I did for that was incomplete and on reflection turned out to be a bit of a kludge, so the kludginess has been discarded for an entirely new collection of bodges!)

  2. If a piece of mail is not going to be accepted (for reasons of /etc/hosts.deny blacklist, sender is pretending to be me, bogus recipient or sender, or whatnot, I was spitting out a 5xx error that included the reason why.

    The problem here is that sometimes I didn’t have a reason why, and thus the error would be “sorry, but (null)” (or possibly a coredump) so now I give a different deny message if there’s no recorded reason for the failure.

  3. My dns resolver code had some places where it wasn’t doing boundary checks, so a malformed dns record could possibly pull in garbage from the stack when fabricating a hostname from the dns record.

The portability tweaks are minor, but keep modern C compilers from whining quite so much when the code is built:

  1. change the order of time_t sizing; now long, long long, int (on ARM, the C compiler whines when time_t is %d despite sizeof(int) == sizeof(long))
  2. abstract flock() into locker.c (locker() function) to work around Minix (and V7?) lack of flock; have the fcntl/flock tester verify that fcntl can unlock a file too
  3. some machines have a 64 bit time_t; configure TIME_T_FMT as a printf/scanf format for it and use string concatenation to build format strings as needed.
version 1.5.10

A few configuration tweaks, a few minimal code tweaks to make the code compile on Minux 3.3, and a couple of bugfixes:

The bugfix is that the spooler was adding a new message id unnecessarily when resending messages that came in w/o a message id (if a message was posted locally with a mua that didn’t add a message id, the message-id would be stuck in the additional headers section of the control file in the queue, so after every attempt to send it would scan be body, not find a message id, then add another one) and I added a short fix that would make it never add a message id on respool (because it would have been added on the initial entry into the queue.)

The minix 3 compatibility patches are to use waitpid() instead of wait3()wait3() is defined as wait350 in the system headers, but that doesn’t exist in libc – and to change the prototype for the local copy of setproctitle() to take const char* instead of char* – again, because setproctitle() was defined in the system headers but, again, wasn’t in libc.

There were also a bunch of configure.sh tweaks done to make everything continue to configure and build on my pile of machines (Freebsd 4.1, Darwin 16.6, Centos 7.?, some modern Debian, and now the Minux 3.3 vm I’m playing around with.)

version 1.5.10(b3)

Half a years worth of updates, plus multiple passes through configure.sh to make it work more placidly on modern Linuxes. I’d set the version to (b3) so I could see if anything exploded before turning around and putting TLS into the thing, but TLS is awful enough (due to all the published TLS libraries having extremely complex published interfaces) so that this bit of coding is running extremely slowly.

But 1.5.10(b3) has the advantage of a configure.sh that works on modern linuxes without dying on older systems, plus a small pile of revisions to improve reliability:

  • Use strlcpy (or a local version of it on systems that don’t have it) instead of strncpy/d[len-1]=0 pairs
  • Add a service file for linux machines that use systemd
  • Substitute portland.or.us for chi.il.us in email/www addresses in the documentation
  • RFC 3865 support (NO-SOLICITING reply to EHLO)
  • In anotherheader() we need to remove newlines from the data we’re adding.
  • If immediate is set, note it in DEBUG output
version 1.5.9
A year’s worth of updates to make the code work better on Apple OSX and modern versions of Linux:
  • Tweak the punctuation on the various “you are tcp wrappered; go away” messages
  • Display env->localhost as part of the DEBUG output
  • Set a default for env->localhost after doing all the configfile and command line options.
  • Add the option ohostname=auto|literal|name;
    1. if auto, do as we’ve always done (get machine name from uname, then use gethostbyname to pick up the canonical dns name)
    2. if literal, get machine name from uname
    3. otherwise use “name”.

    This means I needed to do some changes to the way I process /etc/postoffice.cf (or whatever config file is set with -C); I now make a pass of the command line processing everything EXCEPT -o arguments, then process /etc/postoffice.cf (-C config files were processed when they were encountered on the command line), and finally make a second pass on the command line to process -o options.)

  • If PAM is configured, add “PAM: T” to the output from DEBUG
  • The flock sanity test was bizarrely & brokenly wrong?
  • Add PAM support for AUTH LOGIN (--with-pam configuration option)
  • Check for existance of pw && pass && crypt(pass,pw) before strcmp'ing them.
  • If –with-gdbm, don’t even bother to look for ndbm routines (check $WITH_GDBM)
  • Handle SIGTSTP (signal 18) on modern Unices (temp kludge; need a wrapper)
  • add postoffice -bD (fake daemonize w/o going to bg for Linux systemd rc files)
  • have the ns debug program display AAAA records as AAAA records instead of unknown type records
  • Fix mf.c & smtp.c to compile if milters are not defined
  • Add plists for osx daemonisation (tested on osx 10.5, nothing newer)
  • If the message is being dumped to the spam folder because of tcpwrappers, add a X-Spam header with the reason why.
version 1.5.8

Fix a longstanding bug in the milter code where the headers weren’t being processed properly. It turns out that I keep the FROM: and RCPT: addresses with the trailing \r\n, and the mail filter I use to talk to spamassassin (and I suspect other people use as well) was happily constructing new headers (X-Envelope… ) out of those addresses and passing them along.

The extra newlines meant that everything after the first new header was treated as part of the body, with the expected results of an annoyingly large collection of false positives for spam. This is not the way I want a spam filter to work, so I went in and fixed this particular wagon, which demands a new release after 49 months.

version 1.5.5

Add one new option (“msp” in postoffice.cf) which tells postoffice to accept connections on the message submission port as well as on port 25 (the standard smtp port.) This is so clients that live behind firewalls that block port 25 can actually connect to the mta to send mail.

No additional restrictions are applied to connections that come in via the msp port.

version 1.5.4

A few defects were fixed in this release and I cleaned up some of the code flow in smtp.c to reduce some duplication. There are no changes in functionality (I’m in the throes of trying to implement STARTTLS, but openssl is somewhat painful to try and comprehend, so this is not going to be happening just yet :-(

The bugfixes are:

  1. auth.c had a defect in that if you passed it a null username, it would never set addr->user and thus pass a NULL to the library function getpwnam(). This is an undefined behavior, and the way it works on FreeBSD 7.1 is that the application segfaults deep in the bowels of the library auth code associated with getpwnam(). So I had to correct the offending function to check to see if addr->user was null, and then to return a failure if it was.
  2. I corrected three problems with the milter interface:
    1. only handle failure results in the DATA phase of the protocol,
    2. it was doing the protocol phase handshake incorrectly (it needed to tell milter libraries that it was willing to not to any phases, and then the milter library would return a bitmask of the phases it was expecting,) and
    3. I was not handling temporary failure results at all gracefully.
  3. The -C option now uses the specified configuration files instead of /etc/postoffice.cf, not in addition to it.
  4. a HUP signal is now ignored by the smtp server.
  5. listq now truncates the reason-for-delay line, then manually adds a newline instead of the old behavior of printing out the first 65 characters of the line and hoping that there’s a newline there.
version 1.5.3
This version fixes 1 fairly annoying defect; I had miscoded part of the milter library so that when it sent the mail message off to the milter for processing it would only process one header line as a header, and the rest as the body of the message. This (embarrassingly trivial) fix needs to be a new version, because I’m not adding new features very quickly these days.
version 1.5.2
  1. On FreeBSD 7.1, setreuid() does not work as expected; it doesn’t give up privileges, but was instead writing files AS ROOT. That is bad. So I’m not even going to try to give up and regain privileges inline; instead I’ll just fork off a child process which will give up privileges and THEN attempt to write.
  2. It turns out that my home router drops packets when they’re pushed in too quickly. I discovered that when mail sessions, including ones from gehenna, started timing out during the DATA part of a transaction. But while debugging this feature (which I can’t work around, because a new router would cost >$100; I’m working around it by putting the mail server on gehenna and popping in to check mail) I found a few things that I needed to check.

    • I’m checking for the existance of setlinebuf() in configure.sh, but was not actually bothering to use the resulting #define in my code.
    • if the close-on-exec fcntl exists, use it on the server socket.
  3. Pay attention to the active flag for virtual domains; if that flag is 0, the domain is not active (previously I was just checking to see if the flag existed to see if it was active.)

  4. I was handling MXes improperly; the queue running code was trying to deliver mail to the highest numeric value of MX, instead of the highest priority MX (MX priorities are like D&D armor classes; lower is better.) This was fixed, plus I randomise MXes of the same priority so that they pseudo-round robin.
  5. data() has been reworked to clean up the dot state machine and to make it smaller. Dropping \r’s with prejudice made the handling of EOL.EOL a lot easier, but I still had a lot of stubby nonsense from the old code there.
  6. smtpbugcheck() now uses mfcomplain() to dump out whatever error messages milters give me for rejecting a letter. mfcomplain() strips the extraneous numeric codes off the front of the error message, which cuts down on clutter.
  7. Finally, I was using open()/read()/close() to read the contents of a .forward file into memory. This left me open to fun attacks because I wasn’t bzero()ing the buffer between reads, and a short .forward would just be overlaid on top of a long .forward instead of replacing it.

    I changed that to use FILE*s which do all the trimming and stuff by magic.

version 1.5.1
Add support for
  • mailq -q{pattern} – not implemented but now it doesn’t complain.
  • better support for smtpauth blacklists; change the diagnostic messages for a blacklisted address so it doesn’t give a “come back in (some large# of) seconds” message.
  • Add the new feature of being able to smtpauth blacklist on MAIL FROM: addresses.
version 1.5.0

1.5.0 introduces the next option mxpool, which is used for domains that have multiple mail exhangers but which still want all the mail to go to one server for local processing. If you set mxpool (-omxpool on the command line, or mxpool=1 in postoffice.cf), postoffice will relay local mail to higher priority mail exchangers if they exist in the dns, otherwise it will deliver them to the local machine.

For example, the domain tsfr.org has two mail exchangers

tsfr.org.       IN MX   10 parcelpost.tsfr.org.
tsfr.org.       IN MX   5 postoffice.tsfr.org.

If a client attempts to deliver mail for orc@tsfr.org to parcelpost.tsfr.org, the copy of postoffice there will accept it as if it was a local delivery, but then put it into the outbound mail queue for forwarding to postoffice.tsfr.org. Once relayed to postoffice.tsfr.org, the mail will be delivered locally, because postoffice is the highest priority mail exchanger in the forest.

version 1.4.10

There appear to be mailers out there that spit out extraneous CR’s when they try to pad things up to make the end of lines be CRLF. And postoffice would get very confused about it, and transpose the CR and the character immediately before it. Which led to some really interesting looking unreadable mail. For a long time, the only mail I got with this sort of transposition was spam, so I ignored it, but I’ve recently started to see real mail with this sort of line ending; I redid the line ending code to stop transpositions, but then I’d get really-long-lined mail with CR at the end of every single line, which would lead to mailers (like apple’s Mail.app) thinking there was nothing to the message except headers containing embedded CRs.

So, version 1.4.10 fixes that by the simple RFC2811-breaking expedient of silently discarding naked CRs in the SMTP body. And now the mail that previously had CRs just before the last character in a line doesn’t, and I can read the mail with both mutt and Mail.app.

version 1.4.9
AUTH LOGIN was not working, because the Username: string was being uppercased during message writing and, in addition, domain 0 handling wasn’t working inside auth.c. 1.4.9 corrects this defect and makes postoffice work better with networked mail clients.
version 1.4.8
1.4.8 adds no features, but fixes a couple of problems when trying to build with Xcode on macos 10.5;
  1. INT_MAX is no longer found in the twisty maze of include files postoffice uses, so I had to add <limits.h> to the offending modules.
  2. In AC_SUB, blank expansions were coming out as ^?, which is not what I had in mind. Macos uses the gnu sh clone instead of a real Bourne shell, and that was having echo ${@} expand to ^? inside the shell? Okay, colo(u)r me confused, but I fixed it, I think.

(there is no 1.4.7; I bobbled the version#s and skipped a number)

version 1.4.6

1.4.6 adds a new configuration option – trusted=hostname, which tells postoffice to treat hostname as if it was localhost. In addition, I’ve tweaked the mx getter so that if you set localmx, you need to to explicitly set the MX for the remote machine before it’s treated as localhost.

On the bugfix front, when I went in and attempted to make gcc -Wall quieter, I managed to break builds without the milter code enabled. So 1.4.6 fixes that.

version 1.4.5c

This version sweeps some of the grottier parts of the milter interface up into tidy stub functions, plus changes the way postoffice handles RCPT TO: before MAIL FROM:; it used to spit out a 501 error before it dropped the address, but it now returns a 250 before it drops the address.

I’m willing to do this because of the milter problem I corrected in postoffice 1.4.0 – since some common milters (spamassassin, clamav) drop into an infinite loop when they get RCPT TO: before MAIL FROM:, that means that it never happens under the higher-priced brand and so I won’t have to worry about legitimate mail tripping over this feature.

version 1.4.5a
1.4.5a finished the project to make it so that you can configure it with CC=`gcc -Wall` and get a clean build without errors. The code changes are gross (and inefficient, and quite possibly bugridden,) but now stupid gcc will pass them right on by without complaint.
version 1.4.5
1.4.5 fixes a minor bug (spam=bounce wasn’t setting spam=bounce; this was reported by Bob Dunlop, who was evaluating postoffice for inclusion in an ARM-based system)) and has a fairly extensive code scrub to sweep out things that the FSF’s so-called “C” compiler complains about. Some of this was simply housekeeping (I added a configure check for the volatile keyword, then plastered volatile prefixes on everything that gcc complained about in functions containing setjmp/longjmp; on systems that don’t support volatile it #defines that keyword to an empty comment,) some involved some minor code rework (forcing an assignment to a variable that wouldn’t be set if a loop failed; previously I was failing the condition when loop counter==max,) and some involved tweaking configure to disable the stupid warning (I combine assignments and tests by doing if ( var = setter() ), and gcc whines bitterly about this unless I change my coding style or append -Wno-parentheses to CFLAGS. I’m not going to change my coding style after 30 years of programming, so I have changed CFLAGS instead.)
version 1.4.4
1.4.4 adds spam=-like configuration options to manage connections from blacklisted sites similar to how spam-ridden messages are currently handled. Like spam=, blacklist= supports bounce, accept, and file options, which work much like they work with spam=
blacklist=bounce
Refuse connections from blacklisted hosts (this is the default.)
blacklist=accept
Accept connections from blacklisted hosts. Aside from getting a REJECT message in syslog, this is as if you didn’t have any blacklisting at all.
blacklist=file:folder
Accept connections from blacklisted hosts, but drop all (local) mail from those hosts into a blacklist folder. The format of the folder name is identical to spam=folder, with a ~/ prefix meaning a folder in the user’s home directory, otherwise a folder in the mailspool.
version 1.4.3b
1.4.3b contains one tiny bugfix that corrects an annoying (but not, as far as I can tell, fatal) error; when a message is initially passed into postoffice, it is scanned to see if it contains a Date:, Message-ID:, or From: header. If it does not, those headers are generated and placed into the additional headers section of the control file. The bug is that postoffice didn’t bother to ever check the additional headers section for those required headers, and would thus add a new copy of the originally missing headers every time a queuerun would happen. If you’re attempting to send mail to a site that refuses to accept it, the additional headers section will grow without bound. It’s a dumb coding error, but by the simple expedient of pulling the header scanner into a separate function I could fix it without causing too much additional code bloat.
version 1.4.3a
1.4.3a revises the junkfolder= feature that I introduced in 1.4.3; I’ve renamed the setting to spam=, which can now take three values:
bounce[:why]
Bounce the spam (the traditional – and default – behavior.) why is an optional reason that you can give (one line only) for bouncing the spam-infested mail.
accept
Treat the spam-infested message as a regular mail message. The only way to automatically tell that it’s a spam-infested message is that postoffice adds an X-Spam: header to the message that contains the diagnostic message from the milter or av program. If the incoming message already contains an X-Spam header, that header will not be removed.
folder:path
This is what junkfolder= has become. And the behavior of spam=folder has slightly changed here; local users will have their spam-infested mail delivered to the spamfolder, but remote (and virtual domain) users will have the spam delivered as if the setting was spam=accept. Spam=folder is now a fancy enhancement to spam=accept that doesn’t require every user to use procmail to weed out the X-Spam'med messages. The folder format is slightly different. There are now two types of valid path:
  1. ~/path, which writes the spam to the folder path in the users home directory.  path can be anything (it’s treated like a /path in a .forward file), so the restrictions on file redirections apply here.
  2. suffix, which writes the spam to the folder username:suffix in the mail spool directory. If you’re using imap, this might be a better solution than writing the spam to the users home directory, though the usual caveats about the file growning without bound still apply.

As an extra treat, I’ve actually documented the spam= option now.

version 1.4.3

1.4.3 introduces one new feature; if you set the config file option junkfolder=, unwanted mail will not be bounced but will instead be put into a junkmail folder named <user>:<junkfolder>. This is a first release of this feature, implemented in a hurry because I needed to change my spamcatching behavior so I could catch spamalike mail coming in from my relatives.

As an artifact of the hasty release, there is no documentation other than what’s written here. It’s possible that the functionality will alter over the next few weeks, but if you desire adventure this is the software release for you.

version 1.4.2a
No new features, no new bugfixes, but I’ve switched to git for my SCCS, so I wanted to publish a warning release to see if the new version control system will end up eating my brane.
version 1.4.2
No new features in this one, just bugfixes:
  1. the am64 ubuntu port ran into a debug statement where I didn’t wrap a pair of vfprintf()s in va_start/va_end, but spread them around both of them. On the 32 bit Linuxes I’ve installed on this doesn’t make a difference, but the 64 bit world is, um, different. Ooops.
  2. the other bug was the half-expected rebreaking on MacOS support. Despite having a macbook (which I am even now typing these release notes into), I hadn’t actually bothered to get my own copy of XCode and didn’t test the resolver detection changes for MacOS on a MacOS system. Ooops(2).
version 1.4.1

1.4.1 fixes some of the bugs that were in 1.4.0, adds missing features (and the missing manual page for usermap(7),) and has been tweaked so that it builds on another linux variant (ubuntu on an am86 machine.)

New features

  1. Adds the usermap target ~, which is the username matched by a ~ in a usermap pattern.
  2. Allows multiple usermaps.
  3. List usermaps as part of the SMTP DEBUG output.
  4. The missing usermap(7) manpage.

Bugfixes

  1. Does case-insensitive matching when reading a personal alias file (the Lego shop-at-home website UPPERCASES all user names, so SATH-ORC was not matching the sath-orc entry in my ~/.alias file. Ooops.)
  2. Use the new function AC_CHECK_RESOLVER (in configure.sh) to look for the presence of the Berkeley resolver library. This code attempts to autodetect the broken Darwin resolver library (Darwin, being essentially a FreeBSD branch, has library interfaces that mutate just as fast as gl*bc does. Using BIND_8_COMPAT is only a temporary patch, and I’ll probably have to switch to the djbdns client library to get a more-stable replacement for res_query(),) so it may break Darwin anew.
  3. Lots and lots of code cleanup to remove unused variables and add missing headers.

The resolver library detection fix and the code cleanup was because of a bug report from Wink Saville, who tried to build postoffice on a 64-bit ubuntu 7.04 machine. The resolver library wasn’t detected because there doesn’t appear to be a res_query() in glibc 2.8 (it’s a #define for __res_query(). Ugh,) then, after I tweaked configure.inc so that it would actually DETECT the resolver, it dumped core because I didn’t include <time.h> before using strftime() [sizeof(time_t) != sizeof(int) on an am64 machine] so I had to go on a binge of adding the appropriate #include’s to circumvent any all-the-world’s-a-VAX‘isms that were in the code. (There are still quite a few implicit global functions inside postoffice, but those are functions that return small scalars (I’m not overly worried about what happens when a message gets more than 231 unique recipients on it; I suspect that by that time the machine would be so far into swap that the heat death of the Sun would happen before it finished processing the headers.)

version 1.4.0

1.4.0 introduces the new feature of usermaps, which are a way to let users have temporary mail addresses which they can use when they deal with possible spammers. A usermap is simply a personal alias file (formatted like the aliases(5) file) which is placed in a home directory, and which is referred to by a usermap option in postoffice.cf(5).

The usermap option is formatted as pattern:target{,target}; the pattern is a shell-style wildcard, with the addition of using the ~ to match any valid user in the domain. A match is either an alias or the special token ~/filename, which is the address of a personal alias file. When a usermap is called, postoffice will try each target, stopping when it matches one.

For example, the usermap *-~:~/.alias,bounce will match any mail address of the format something-user. If it matches an address, postoffice will first see if the address is in ~user/.alias, and then if it doesn’t find a match there it will map to the fixed address bounce.

There are also a couple of trivial bugfixes in 1.4.0
  1. Postoffice wraps smtp sessions in several layers of timeout. There were some cases where an alarm would fire when the default signal catcher was running, so you’d end up with core dump and a crash warning for a completely normal timeout.
  2. A second, and more annoying, bug was discovered when testing the new usermap code. Postoffice is fairly relaxed about the order of MAIL FROM and RCPT TO commands and will accept them in any order as long as both of them have been issued when a DATA command arrives. But some of the sendmail filters (milters) I use are not so forgiving, and if they get a RCPT TO prior to a MAIL FROM, they will freeze and lock the mail session. This is bad programming, to say the least, but it’s broken in a sendmail-compatable fashion so it’s not likely that it will ever change. So I’ve crippled postoffice (if built with --with-milter) to whine bitterly about RCPT TO without a prior MAIL FROM.
  3. A super-trivial bugfix is a tweak to configure.sh to test for the existance of malloc.h so I can only include it on machines that actually have it. This is a generalization of the OS_DARWIN support that Andras Salamon contributed for 1.3.8c, and should make the code a little bit more portable to other machines that use C compilers that blindly follow the whims of the (break-all-of-the-)standards committees.

Older versions of the code are still available.